The aim of the project was to supply the Research and Development Team and other National Committees of ESN Poland with the data about Sections without a burden of another form to fill. As Section Questionnaire covers plenty of day-to-day activities of every Section, after some back office work, it was perfectly fit to become such a source.
The objectives of this task were to:
- combine Section Questionnaire datasheets that were sent to the National Board into one file,
- provide a systematic way of organizing and storing data, making it easy to access for every Member of ESN Poland,
- prepare easy to understand tool, making retrieving specific data quick and efficient,
- enable data sharing among various Committees and Teams of ESN Poland, improving collaboration and information exchange,
- provide a Section well-being tracking tool, allowing identification of certain trends in development specifically for one Section and all Sections in our National Organisation.
Each year, our Sections go through the process of filling out the forms of the Section Questionnaire. Afterwards, the results are returned to the National Board of the given country. However, until now, the data collected in the process was not fully used by ESN Poland or even accessible for the Sections. The spreadsheets we received were raw and not everybody could draw conclusions out of them. That's where the idea of creating a database by combining data originated from multiple years of Section Questionnaires emerged. It started out as a pure source of information for the Research and Development Team of ESN Poland, a source material on which they could work and improve their data-analysis skills. However, our R&D Team and right after them the Network Care Team of ESN Poland realised that with the access to data we are able to prepare short comparisons of the status of each Section in the course of recent years, pinpoint areas requiring improvement and provide them with help they need. This database can also be used to find similarities between the Sections and how, i.e. COVID-19 affected some of them. As the idea of presenting the answers in an accessible way for the Members of ESN Poland evolved, we now showcase Section Reports (report form filled by the Sections answering the questions given by the National Coordinators, Committees, and Board) in the same way. Sections, given that they fill out everything properly, have now most of the answers from their predecessors available at hand. Data, before it is published is stripped of all the personal information leaving only data that can be used by every person in ESN.
